Mark Warner, Tim Kaine Enjoyed Spooking Incoming Va. Governor

Another Halloween may have come and gone, but that doesn’t mean a good scare won’t await the next inhabitant of Virginia’s executive mansion come January.

It seems outgoing Virginia governors have a habit of pranking the new guy — a tradition Virginia Democrats Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, now both in the Senate, wholly embraced before leaving Richmond in the rearview.

Current Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell told the Richmond Times-Dispatch that Kaine kept him and his family on edge by triggering strategically placed cellphones (hidden behind walls and atop elevators) late into the night.

That disclosure prompted Kaine to reveal how his lifelong buddy, Warner (the two met at Harvard Law School in 1980), had wreaked a little havoc on his own moving-in day. A Warner aide confirmed that the boss had propped up a cardboard cutout of himself (a promotional tool leftover from the state fair) in one of the showers.

“Mark Warner has known Tim Kaine for 30 years, and figured what better use for it than to try to frighten the Kaine children?” the aide said of the restroom interloper.

The stunt evidently worked like a charm. “The last thing a tired, newly sworn in Gov. Kaine expected to find in his shower that morning was a life-size cardboard cutout of his friend and predecessor, Mark Warner,” a Kaine aide told HOH.